A Personal Pantheon
“All history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self Reliance”
The Good Lord may have no respect of persons [1], but I do! Well, to be precise, I have a great respect for Man, so the Good Lord forgive me for listing a few examples of what greatness lie within us all.
Disclaimer: I may have included a disproportionate number of Americans (indicated with
). This should not be regarded as an assertion that Americans are superior, but merely an assertion that I am American!
Eve & Prometheus
Eve, and Prometheus each exhibited the courage to be God-like, even under penalty of death. These, and perhaps other mythic heros, mark the beginning of Man. (I'd include Adam, but he only seemed to be following Eve).
Heraclitus (540–480 BC)
“All things are an exchange for Fire, and Fire for all things”
Heraclitus was the great grandaddy of process philosophy. He was regarded quite highly by Nietzsche, who was very critical of the western philosophical tradition.
“The world forever needs the truth, hence the world forever needs Heraclitus.” — Nietzsche [2]
Plato was understandably distraught by the Heraclitian philosophy of perpetual change, and knowing Heraclitus to be right about the nature of the world, declared that the world must be illusory, and imagined a better world of eternal forms where nothing ever changes. By doing so, Plato was clearly forfeiting the world to Heraclitus, though he refused to honor this world as real.
Heraclitus did not see illusion; rather he saw very real exchanges of power occurring constantly and universally. The first confirmation of this, besides the begrudging admission of Plato, may have been the discovery of inertia by several thinkers of the middle ages, and finally demonstrated experimentally by Galileo.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Washington State University: World Civilizations
Bright Heraclitus: Prophet of Power, by Herbert F. Vetter
Heraclitus Lecture, by S. Marc Cohen, University of Washington
Heidegger's Reading of Heraclitus, by Brian A.Bard
QuotationsPage.com
Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)
“I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him.”
The first experimental physicist. Performed ground-breaking experiments in inertia, gravity, and projectile motion. Invented the telescope, and made revolutionary discoveries about the solar system.
He is credited for destroying the idea that heavenly bodies are flawless (and other-worldly), and bringing the study of motion down to earth.
Galileo's law of inertia stated that the natural state of an object in motion is continued motion, which is in direct opposition to the Aristotelian idea that the natural state of all objects is rest. This implied that the energy of any closed system in conserved, further implying that energy is transferred between elements of that system and does not diminish with time. This is a very Heraclitian idea.
Wikipedia: Galileo Galilei
Wikipedia: Inertia
Isaac Newton (1643–1727)
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
Father of classical physics (laws of motion and gravitation) and the calculus. An unparalleled genius.
Newton added two laws of motion to Galileo's law of inertia. One of these two laws, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, is very Heraclitian, but it is also important to note that with every improvement in our understanding of changes in nature—that is, motion and dynamics, our understanding of nature becomes more and more appreciative of change.
Whereas we may have previously regarded the world as consisting of naturally static things acting on one another, the discoveries of Galileo and Newton made the world look less like the world of independent things with subject-predicate relationships, and more like the universal flux and exchange governed by universal law. The things still existed with Newton, only they were no longer actors: they were objects. This discovery led to a change in worldview that had its ups and downs, but this new view of the world as a massive, intelligible machine would inspire us to seek out relations and processes like never before.
Eventually, the very sense of substance would break down in physics, but we too often forget that the idea of autonomous substances was delt a heavy blow by Galileo and Newton, and the idea that all things are an exchange for Fire, and Fire for all things finally began to reappear.
Thomas Paine (1737–1809)
“The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.”
— The Age of Reason (1794)
I marked Thomas Paine as an American (top of page), though he was born and raised British, and might have remained so had he not been expelled from the British Empire for agitating against the Monarchy. He was also a self-professed world citizen.
Paine was a patriot and an influential revolutionary propagandist, but he was, even more, a free thinker and a courageous advocate of causes that were before his time. He was a Unitarian, though certainly a radical one for his time.
ushistory.org
Council for Secular Humanism
Wikipedia
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)
“When I open my eyes I must sigh, for what I see is contrary to my religion, and I must despise the world which does not know that music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.” [3]
While we're recognizing heros, let's not overlook the composer of the "Eroica" symphony. IMHO, no artist better typifies the dawn of the Romantic era and its reverence for humanity and nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82)
“I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
Founding father and chief spokesperson of American Transcendentalism. He exerted an immense influence on American thought in the mid-nineteenth century, and directly inspired Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, and to a lesser degree Emily Dickinson and many others.
Emerson, perhaps following his father, began as a Unitarian minister, but before long set off on his own as the herald of a new America that would look inward for direction, and not so much from England and Europe. Of course Emerson was heavily influenced by Old World thinkers, but not exclusively. His was a youthful individualism of the frontier, where each man and woman would look inward for moral guidance and inspiration. While owing much to Romanticism, that Old World term does not quite do Emerson justice.
One paradoxical aspect of Emerson is that he shunned the idea of personal immortality, yet he seemed to believe quite strongly in karma, which appears to have led him to believe in reincarnation. On the one hand, he is a man of moral courage who staunchly believes that a yearning for personal immortality is a weakness, and that a belief in personal immortality diminishes the vitality of life, yet we find that he has, in the interest of Divine justice, turned to karma and reincarnation for peace of mind. This is one contradiction that I find difficult to forgive. A critic might be inclined to ask, if the moral force of the soul is so compelling, then why cannot Emerson hold to moral immediacy as declare virtue to be its own best reward, rather than timidly backing into a belief that postpones justice to future lives? In this respect, Thoreau—to name but one—exhibited more integrity as a Transcendentalist:
“One world at a time.” — Henery David Thoreau
transcendentalists.com
Texts
Emerson, Evolution, and Transmigration by Robert C. Gordon, PhD.
Henry David Thoreau (1817–62)
“Our life is frittered away by detail ... Simplify, Simplify.”
Pre-eminent social activist and hands-on transcendentalist; evangelist for the simple, deliberate life; student of human consciousness; critic of complacency; a noteworthy naturalist and ecologist; poet, and a bit of a humorist as well.
First and foremost, Thoreau was to me a man of faith.
“How vigilant we are! determined not to live by faith if we can avoid it; all the day long on the alert, at night we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to uncertainties.” — Walden
Thoreau's faith was a positive faith in man. This was not a humanistic faith resorted to for any lack of faith in God, for Thoreau possessed that more general faith equally—only his church was Nature. It was upon this rock of faith that his politics were established.
Thoreau's essay Civil Disobedience is now famous for having influenced the great activists Martin Luther King Jr.and Mohandas Gandhi. Thoreau stood against big government, and the equivalence of law and morality that government seems to naturally enforce. He was first and foremost a man of conscience, and he was convinced that government had silenced the consciences of the great majority of citizens.
“Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then?” — Civil Disobedience
In particular, Thoreau stood against economic dehumanization, slavery, and militaristic expansionism, but Thoreau's social agenda was no mere sum of these particulars.
Walden was a kind of laboratory experiment in living and a metaphor for the solitary conscience of the engaged individual. Thoreau was no hermit, but rather a very socially aware citizen who was a regular visitor and observer of nature.
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” — Walden
He may have overstated the wildness of his experiences in the extravagance of his prose, but he and others were well aware that Walden was no wilderness. When he was living at Walden Pond on Emerson's property in Concord Massachusetts, the American frontier was far to the west. Texas had been annexed by the United States, the Oregon Trail was well-established, and the California Gold Rush was just around the bend.
Thoreau, though outspoken and steadfast, made no tremendous sacrifices. In this sense he was not a hero. He did not put his life on the line as Thomas Paine did. Thoreau was a radical, but he was also a liberal gentleman of New England society. Still, Thoreau made his mark on America and the world. Whereas Emerson had great influence during his own lifetime, Thoreau's influence was postponed until long after his death. In this sense, Thoreau was more a man of the 20th Century.
Walden
Civil Disobedience
Charles Darwin (1809–82)
“I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men.”
What scientist has had more influence on human thought than this modest Englishman? Not only did he make a monkey of man—but seriously—he introduced a process-based approach that has had an immense impact on various sciences and even metaphysics.
Of course he conceived of one of the first principles of ecology, the oft-misunderstood principle of natural selection:
“In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.”
His parents were both baptised as Unitarians [4], and Charles received some Unitarian education as a child.
Autobiography
Literary Heritage
Emily Dickinson (1830–86)
“The Soul selects her own Society—”
In the past I would have saved this spot for Walt Whitman, but my appreciation of Emily Dickinson has lately surpassed that of our much-extolled national poet. Where Whitman took many of his themes directly from Ralph Waldo Emerson, and strove earnestly to promote himself as the Emersonian national poet, Dickinson spoke truly from her transcendental soul, and was more inclined to avoid publication. It seems that Dickinson's poems were part of her life, whereas Whitman's were part of his agenda. Where Whitman was exhilarated by the diversity of life, Dickinson was haunted by life—a spirited enchantment. As the years go by, Whitman's passionate intensity—to snip from Yeats—seems more superficial—its novelty expired, whereas the enchanted character of life expressed by Dickinson seems deeply personal and profound.
... Or perhaps I just don't get out like I used to!
Emily Dickinson's Life
The Complete Poems
The Academy of American Poets
Friedrich W. Nietzsche (1844–1900)
I like to think of Nietzsche as one of the great process philosophers, inspired as he was by Darwin and Heraclitus; but process was not just natural law to Nietzsche: philosophy was also a process.
Nietzsche had a good bit in common with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, in that each was a radical individualist and none of these individualists trusted the state or traditional morality:
“The state lieth in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it saith it lieth; and whatever it hath it hath stolen.” — Thus Spake Zarathustra
... but Nietzsche defies comparison. Where Thoreau insisted on following what he believing was his uniquely individual conscience, Nietzsche seemed to make sport of ridiculing a vast array of conventions. He was such an inferno of affirmational criticism (paradox intended) that one must be careful not to use him as source of doctrine. Nietzsche wasn't about doctrines, but about the free, creative influence of the human mind and will. He was not about systematic philosophy, but rather his prose was an experience, a process for the reader to take part in.
Thus Spake Zarathustra
John Muir (1838–1914)
“I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”
Founder of the Sierra Club. Famous for his advocacy of wilderness, but there's more.
Having seen much of the Sierra first hand, Muir got a notion that glaciers carved much of the terrain in the high Sierra, and was ridiculed for it by the geological establishment, which consisted most notably of an arrogant Josiah D. Whitney, who had an aversion to field work, and his fumbling lacky Clarence King, who was infamous for getting lost, exagerating his own accomplishments, and naming the highest peak in the contiguous US after his boss when he couldn't even recognize or locate it with consistency.
Muir's empirical position on glaciation eventually won out.
Muir was a skilled and rugged mountaineer. I've tried some of the terrain that he mastered, and it has become clear to me that this guy had a talent for finding his way around in the mountains. He must have been perceptive, and he must have been tough.
Muir was strongly influenced by American Transcendentalism, but his love of nature and independent spirit predated that influence. He immigrated from Scotland as a child, and enjoyed wandering the Wisconsin woods in his youth.
Sierra Club: John Muir Exhibit
Wikipedia
Albert Einstein (1879–1955)
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
This man cannot be overrated, no matter how much a household name Einstein is; no matter what popular books on Quantum Mechanics may make of his big defeat at the hands of Bohr and Heisenberg.
We ought not forget that it was Einstein that first came up with the idea of quanta. ... but that's only the tip of the iceberg.
Einstein's Principle of Special Relativity presents us with some revolutionary ideas:
- absolute simultanaeity is a figment of our imagination.
- our eyes do not see the present, but the past; in some cases the remote past.
- mass and energy are equivalent, or interchangeable.
- substance and process are interchangeable; composed of the same stuff?
Einstein shows us that time is really only a spatial dimension. Our sense of the present is really only a subjective sense of one's precise position in spacetime. Each position in spacetime, then, has equal claim to the present. Who is alive now? Who is dead? It's all relative.
Our present only experiences the dead, in the sense that the people that we meet are—however slightly—in our past. We cannot ask if they are still alive in our immediate present, for simultanaeity does not exist in nature. The fact that they come from our past does not actually make them dead; they are simply living in another time, just as they are standing in another place.
We do not actually travel through spacetime, but rather we are all instants—or perhaps coordinates—in the spacetime continuum. There is a person in an adjacent place and time that is causally linked with you. The causal links appear to you as memory. There is yet another person to the opposite side of you to whom you are their immediate past. And so in extends outward from you; none of these people is unborn or dead; they are simply different people—ever so slightly different.
Ok, so Plato lives on, or a continuum of Platos live on—somewhere out there in spacetime. That doesn't mean that we can go pay him a visit. On the other hand, we're not absolutely sure that we can't. Quantum Mechanics would give us more insight into this question.
Mass-energy equivalence brings us another striking change in world view. Substance and energy are interchangeable; hence we are one giant step nearer to Heraclitus. We now know that matter can be converted into energy. We are one step closer to completely losing confidence in our cherished metaphysical construct called substance.
Stay tuned. Quantum Mechanics has yet more to reveal on this as well.
The Scientists: Albert Einstein
Time Magazine: Person of the 20th Century
Neils Bohr (1885–1962)
“The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”
Famous for formulating the complementarity principle, central to the Copenhagen Interpreation of quantum mechanics. As with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Bohr's principle pointed to our inability to view nature without having an impact on the object of our observation. Bohr's idea was that our manner of observing affects whether we see a particle (an object) or a wave (a relation).
Amongst this great scientist's accomplishments was having been a Dane!
This discussion continues under Werner Heisenberg below.
Nobel Bio
Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962)
“But this; bright power, dark peace;
Fierce consciousness joined with final
Disinterestedness;” [5]
Jeffers depicted a power and majesty in nature and time unlike any other poet (that I'm aware of). Much of Jeffers poetry ...
He was a native of Pittsburgh, PA, but moved with his family to California as a teenager, and settled in Carmel, CA with his wife Una in 1914.
Modern American Poetry
Jeffers Studies
Tor House Foundation
Academy of American Poets